In an annual worldwide competition established with a more local focus, to make the Tuscan city and environs the international capital of photography (previously), the Siena Drone Photo Awards once again delivers with a rather incredible gallery of submissions that express narratives not seen at ground level, requiring a thousand foot view, often revealing the inappreciable effects of human industry on the natural environment or the scale of said markets.
Like the overall winner captured in Bangladesh of a beached salvage operation, this other runner-up image of ferries in Dhaka, from George Steinmetz, in contrast to the country’s shipbreaking remit, as thousands take to the waterways surrounding the capital to return home for Eid al-Adha (বকরি ঈদ, honouring Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his own son at God’s command—Ishmael may have been saved by the divine intervention of an angel delivering a goat in his stead or that happier ending may be the latter insertion of a pious fiction, God replacing this fail-son with the more righteous Isaac—stones are cast at Satan for trying to convince the patriarch otherwise) celebrations, the deck of the barges filled with vivid patchwork of travellers and their belongings.